First Evar GMing.

[Cattie]

OK, so....I've never DMd D&D before. Not 1, not Ad&D, not 3e, nothing. I have to think up a campaign, and fast. Any advice, O Ye Knowledgable Ones?

Edited for craptastic spellings.

[carmachu]

OK, so....I've never DMd D&D before. Not 1, not Ad&D, not 3e, nothing. I have to think up a campaign, and fast. Any advice, O Ye Knowledgable Ones?

Edited for craptastic spellings.



Preg-gen module, or Dungeon magazine adventure. I'd hazard Dungeon mag adventure, things are laid out and they give advice to scale the adventure up or down.

THis is good:

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0977007103/ref=s9_asin_image_1/102-1848244-3212121

Or if you can get them, the age of Worms 12 adventure set takes you through 1st to 20....

They have another started, Savage Coast or something like that.


Unless you have something in mind, Dungeon Magazine adventures are nice to walk you through the adventure, and are laid out for you.

Even if you only use one adventure to kcik off your own world, it will get you in the grove.


Or you could use the City in The Spire: Ptolus

http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?ptolus


Or There's "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil."

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=products/dndacc/882370000

Or there is the World's Largest Dungeon

http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Largest-Dungeon-Alderac-Entertainment/dp/1594720290/sr=8-1/qid=1165798138/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1848244-3212121?ie=UTF8&s=books


I have the last 3, and depending on where you are you could borrow them. I'm waiting on a ebay autcion for the Shackled city.....at 2/3rd asking price.

[BlueNinja]

Well, I don't know what to give you as far as plotlines go. If it's not expected to be an ongoing or lengthy campaign, go with one of the fun storyline cliches found here. (http://www.criticalfumble.net/forum/showthread.php?t=185) It will hopefully help you immensely.

Otherwise, check out this thread (http://www.criticalfumble.net/forum/showthread.php?t=63) so that you at least know what the biggest problems are likely to be with making up a campaign. A certain amount of winging it is good (as you look less stupid when the players and/or dice act unexpectedly) but running a whole campaign off of winging it is a bad idea.

[Cattie]

Sounds great. The guys haven't played since AD&D days....I think it's a case of "OO GIRL!" But I want them to enjoy the game, since it's changed so much since then.

[Parzival]

Terrain dictates. <shrug> What do you want to do? Most advice is situation-dependant.

[Starhawk]

If you don't know what you're doing in terms of GMing, definitely go with a store-bought adventure path of some kind. It will take a lot of the stress off. :signs013:

[Detritus]

If you don't know exactly what you want to do, you can have a look through the free adventures (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/oa/20030530b&page=1) that WotC provide on their website. "A Dark And Stormy Knight" is a good 1st-level one for getting the party together, if you wanted to avoid a situation like, y'know, an extradimensional portal opening up in some tavern that the PCs just happen to be in. I'm sure there are others that fit this description, too.

You can also have a look at the DMG2, which has a pretty detailed town in one of the chapters. It's Saltmarsh, which might ring a bell with the Old School types. For the one-shot Gestalt game that I ran a couple of times earlier this year, I basically took one of the Saltmarsh plot hooks, combined it with one of the free WotC adventures, and had the plot outline for the module. No big whoop.

[Lost Soul]

For a first try at DMing, and with players on their first stint with D&D 3.x, I'd go with a published adventure. Not a setting, a single adventure. D&D 3.x is very different from AD&D (for starters, wizards are playable starting from first level, clerics are no longer just healing batteries, and fighters aren't mindless battle tanks anymore.) No need to burn yourself out creating a campaign that will never be played because everybody wants to play something else after the first three sessions, or because you flubbed the rules so badly the first game that it's become unsalvageable.

Once you've got a few sessions under your belt, reboot and restart.

Use the following Commandments:

Character-building:

1-Start at first level.
2-Core rules only.
3-Character creation using only the stuff in the PHB, no optionnal rules, variants, or house rules allowed (except the simple point-buy stat system detailed in the DMG)
4-No evil (duh), chaotic neutrals (due to the "Chaotic Neutral characters are frigging insane" baggage from AD&D), or true neutral characters (Since you don't want them switching to evil periodically to "maintain the balance")
5-No hugely involved backstory that basically shape the whole campaign. Accept a max of three potential plot hooks per characters (I'm hunting for the man who killed my father...) or one major (... and he's the advisor to the King...) Don't accept anything more than that (... who's really a usurper, because my father *was* the king and I'm the rightful heir.)

[ed]

the advice here thus far is good but before i can hope to add, a few questions:

1. what precisely are the circumstances over which you have no control re: PCs/player tastes?

2. one-shot, mini-campaign, something else?

3. face to face, online, PBP/PBEM?

ed

[Lost Soul]

And some advice on world-building and story-building.

1-START SMALL!!! The only "macro" stuff you need are gods. For an even simpler setting, use the singular instead, and make God non-interventionnist. Allow worshipping of God along different aspects (God-as-Warrior, God-as-Artisan...) so that the cleric can choose his domain, but scrap the whole "must assign spheres of influence to gods." And yes, God is non-interventionnist, so if you want a schism later on for some religious conflict, he won't just appear and tell the world the Word again. And in small villages, you just need one generic priest, not an handful of clerics from ten different religions. This doesn't mean that there aren't evil godlike figures - they're not called gods by the population and they're not worshipped by anyone openly.

2-Build a closed system at first: an island duchy with two medium-sized cities and a handful of villages is more than enough to get your characters to 8th or 9th level. The original Temple of Elemental Evil took characters from 4th to 12th with one village and one city (and most of the interesting stuff took place in the village.) Granted, it was a very Gygaxian module.

3-The most important lesson in worldbuilding: There's only one reason to make a city map: if you're planning an urban warfare scenario. Otherwise, stick to descriptions. Just read Pratchett's Watch books. Ankh-Morpork is possibly the most alive fantasy city ever written about, and until Night Watch there was no city map for the reader to look at.

4-If you have the time, plan your villains and adventure sites in advance, so you can plant rumors and possibly even allow the players to investigate stuff in complete disorder. This may be the only reason to ever read a book by Terry Brooks, but Magic Kingdom For Sale illustrates this beautifully: What'shisname the Hero has an handful of challenges to conquer (The rebellious barons, Nightshade the witch, and the dragon), and he has to pick how to tackle them. If you can handle the workload, have the various villains have their own agendas instead of being a monolithic evil. That way, you can have scenarios such as "Since you defeated Barrg the Troll, the goblins no longer have to fear the swamp, so they've moved over to the western forest and they're now harassing Brookhaven Village." And of course, since the goblins have moved away, Mordak the necromancer no longer has any convenient corpses to animate, so he's resorted to killing humans, but the players don't know that yet. :)

5-We're social animals: players care so much more about NPCs than about anything else. It's worth sacrificing some drama and internal consistency to foster interesting PC/NPC relationships. A wandering merchant (that always happen to be around whenever the players want to shop) might not be believable, but you'll be surprised how disappointed the players get when he's not around. My band of brothers isn't high on sentimentality, and they're downright mercenary when we're gaming, but the party that haggled with the village mayor before rescuing the kids from the ogre parted with their single potion of Cure Disease for the grouchy dwarven blacksmith because they got tired of hearing him whine over his Beardclump affliction.

[JasonStarfire]

As has been stated before - core rules only. I can't stress this enough. Somehow, some way, one of your players may find some way to completely unbalance the game and no novice DM needs that. Let your players know ahead of time, and let them know after one campaign or a few adventures, you may allow other sources, but until then keep it simple.

[Grendel]

The Adventure

Beg, borrow, or steal (or buy) a low-level module.

Read it front to back.

Read it again.

Read it again.

Feel free to change anything with the understanding that the more you change, the more you need to keep track of.


GM Skills

As you have no experience DMing, get your hands on a DMG and a PH. Read the sections on combat. Read them again. Read them again. You can muddle your way through roleplaying encounters and such. But when you start a combat, you want it to go smoothly, quickly, and give the players a sense of non-stop nail-biting action, not a long series of moments that all start with "umm ... OK ... ummm ... hold on a second, let me look that up"

Know the following at all times:

The terrain. The weather. Lighting conditions, noises, smells. The players need to FEEL the setting. The more you give them, the more they'll give you.

Who is in the area/building/room/street at this exact moment. Also, who will be entering or leaving the encounter zone at any given time. The world does not stop just because the PCs do.

You should create a rough timeline for the day for any major NPC (Sleep until 10, pub until noon, market until 4, at his shop until 9, pub until 3 a.m.). This way you don't have to guess when players inevitable start seeking someone out.

Grab the phone book and write down 30 names that interest you, including some female names. Use them for you NPCs. You can just say "The bartender asks you ... the shop keep says ... the blacksmith wants to know" every time they have contact with an NPC. Or you can turn the NPCs into real people by naming them and having a personality in mind; even something as basic as "serious and a little pugnacious" or "comical and inappropriate". It gives you an idea of how to roleplay the encounters.

[JasonStarfire]

I thought there was a smiley that was holding a sign pointing up and agreeing with the previous post, but these were the best I could find. :lecture: :verystupid:

:D

Anyway, I've often been told that you should read an adventure module at least 3 times to commit it to memory (actually, I was given that advice to be applied toward studying, but that's boring).

As far as combat goes, just know it. A lot. Even if you don't include many combat scenarios in your game, it will bog down if you don't know it. Some people don't allow attacks of opportunity when first starting out, but that's up to you and how comfortable you are with the system.

[Lost Soul]

And some system-specific info:

1- The CR system is a pretty good guide to creating encounters of the "you see orcs at 100 yards as they round the corner, they see you, roll initiative" variety. That's not a bad thing, as most encounters effectively fit that description. But the system doesn't work in four situations:

a) A single enemy vs. the party: A CR1 monster won't draw 20% of a first-level party's ressources.

b) Lots of weaklings vs. the party: 6 monsters of CR 1/6 aren't serious threat either, mostly because at that point they're not aggressive enough to matter unless you play them as psycho monsters.

c) Monsters with special abilities may be VERY off in their CR, depending on whether or not the party has the weapon/spell necessary to kill them or not, or whether the ability can come into play. The dire rat's disease would be pretty nasty, except that a level 1 adventure isn't going to last long enough for the disease to incubate.

d) Special conditions can be very deadly, especially at low levels.

2- Print out the SRD (www.d20srd.org) version of the spells your casters have. Sure, it's a lot of pages for the cleric, but it's the best gaming aid I've ever seen.

3- D&D 3.x is much deadlier at low levels than the previous editions: kobolds have spells. Orcs wield greataxes, and those pack a wallop (a greataxe critical can deal up to 36 damage before strength bonuses). A fighter may have 14 hp, and can go to -9 without dying. Let's just say that you shouldn't assume the same monster-to-PC ratios work in 3.x.

[Cattie]

*Takes a moment to :bowdown: to everyone*

It's one hell of a start, guys, thanks. I'm just a liiiiiittle nervous about the old "Death by housecat". heh.

But I think we'll be OK for now.

Now, to talk the boyfriend in to trying it.

[Detritus]

I'm just a liiiiiittle nervous about the old "Death by housecat". heh.
Just make sure you don't have the cat do a full attack as its action. :D

[Origen]

Everyone has pretty much covered anything I might have said, and more. Start basic, and don't incorporate too many other books into the game until you get a good handle on things. We're a pretty good resource here, if you have any questions.

Good luck. You're going to have a lot of fun, I think.

[Detritus]

Please let us know how things go in the first session.